alt Hacker NewsPart of it is knowing that whatever sort of enshittification the cloud providers do, my local programming environment won’t ever be less effective than it is today locally. It’s the same reason my entire development stack from editor to compiler is open source. I don’t need to modify it today, but I always must retain the option to do so later.
There are several things I do in my life that only pay off in the event of a big disaster, like an extended internet outage, civil unrest, supply chain disruption, war, etc.
I like to be able to do the things I do even if offline for weeks.
I spent a lot of money for more flash in my iPad Pro so I can keep all of offline wikipedia and OSM in it, for example, along with tons of books. It’s sort of like being a digital prepper. (Being a prepper is a spectrum, from anyone who keeps food in their pantry to people building bunkers under their house - how much you invest is a personal prudence and threat modeling decision.)
Also, privacy. And when I got the Mac Studio the 512GB was only $15k, which is dirt cheap for that much VRAM.
> Part of it is knowing that whatever sort of enshittification the cloud providers do, my local programming environment won’t ever be less effective than it is today locally.
Is that true though? Many of the core LLMs need to be retrained as languages evolve to incorporate changes (language specifics, compilers, tooling, etc.). To some degree this can be handled via context injection in a variety do forms (agents looking up documentation and so on) but inevitably it’s not stationary in time, just as your OSS stack (probably) isn’t (depending on the languages, technologies, and use cases).
So your hardware is to some degree dependent on the good merit of groups like Z or Alibaba or whomever pushing out updated open weight models that dumped loads of capital into to train. You can keep using the existing models but at some point I suspect they’ll start to have more friction due to dated specs in language and so on. Again there are tuning and ways of layering this information on, and in theory you can even do some training on your own but I don’t think it’s as stationary as being portrayed here.
Those updated open weight models may not always be there (updated on new data). The usability of them is probably fairly long to be fair, but I suspect you’re going to see explosion in everything from libraries to languages etc due to LLMs so even the rate of change across your OSS stack may cause these models to be dated quite quickly, at least in the core model which will require layering fixes.
To be clear I’m on the fence thinking about much of the same issues and as close as I am to pulling the trigger, I keep thinking of very valid counter arguments as to why it’s me just wanting this thing I own. Which may be enough.